Wildfire Destruction in Los Angeles
Vocab level: B2
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People are returning to their neighborhoods to find there's nothing to come home to.
Just piles of ash and masonry where there were once multi-million dollar houses.
It's an apocalyptic landscape.
But amid this desert of destruction in Pacific Palisades,
Jim Morray found this 3 million dollar home virtually untouched.
As residents assess the damage, they'll see house after house, block after block, of total destruction.
And then they'll come across something like this, and they'll ask one question:
Why is this the last house standing?
Well, there is a reason.
Architect Greg Chason built it just six months ago.
He came by to see how it fared in the inferno.
The side is stucco, which serves as a fire block on the sidewalls here, so that helped a lot.
We also used a metal roof, steel roof, with special underlayment...
designed to protect it against fire.
Some homes survived by sheer luck.
Dirk Michaels could not believe his home was spared when so many others burned.
I literally got on my knees and I sobbed.
But thousands of others are dealing with irreplaceable losses.
We ran into a man named Greg,
who was seeing the house he grew up in, or what's left of it, for the very first time.
When a lot of people come back to a spot like this in a location, they're hoping that there's something left, some memento....
a photo, a jewelry box, a plate...
Do you see anything recoverable?
I don't, but my dad did tell me...
his grandmother's wedding ring is in here somewhere, so...
We'd really like to find that. Also, my grandfather's medals. He was a war veteran.
Raking through the ashes is a heart-wrenching task.
No rings, but Greg found two garden ornaments with sentimental value.
And two LA police officers helped him retrieve them.
This woman has only memories left.
We hosted Christmas Eve and Christmas Day here.
And everybody was here.
My little house that I loved.
Another hazard is emerging: air quality.
Everyone in the fire-stricken neighborhoods is advised to wear N95 masks outside,
like the ones so many of us wore during the pandemic.
The air quality is horrible.
It's one of the worst that I've seen, and it's everywhere."
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